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Bitter Fight to Determine Who Is an American Indian Turns to DNA Testing

Kevin Taylor

10/13/11

The onset of casino gaming brought great change in Indian country, but it also created unexpected­—and frequently heated—arguments over Indian identity: What makes somebody a member of a tribe, and how it is measured?

Traditional metrics include tracing lineage from flawed base-membership rolls and the sometimes-complicated math of blood quantum. Over the past decade, some tribes have turned to DNA testing to make sure tribal members, and potential enrollees, are who they say they are—at least when it comes to parentage.

This trend has come to just a small number of tribes, perhaps 40 or 50 out of the 265 with gaming, one consultant on tribal government estimates, and just a sliver of the Indian nations overall. But the joined issues of Indian identity and the sharing of lucrative casino profits have had an outsized impact. Through DNA tests or other methods, thousands of Indian people have found themselves disenrolled in recent years for failing to meet tribal criteria.

In August, the Cherokee Nation appears to have won a long and bitter fight to disenroll nearly 3,000 freedmen, the descendants of black slaves owned by Cherokee, who had briefly tried to use DNA to show their “Indianness.”

A small tribe in California, the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, which has been embroiled in enrollment fights for 30 years, in September adopted a DNA-testing ordinance that tribal leaders say will bring stability at long last.

And in Wisconsin, a young Indian woman, Daria Powless, had the fruits of her sweet basketball season turn to vinegar when the apparently jealous family of a teammate unearthed a painful secret to challenge her qualifications as a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation. On September 17, the Ho-Chunk Nation General Council voted to disenroll her. The Ho-Chunk began using DNA about 10 years ago, making the tribe one of the earliest to use the technique, but it has only been formalized into the tribal constitution since June 2009. It is only used to augment earlier methods of determining enrollment. “It’s still blood-quantum based,” says Sheila Corbine, attorney general for the Ho-Chunk Nation. “But as with many tribes there is rumor and innuendo about who is a tribal member or not. All the DNA testing is designed for, in our instance anyway, is to prove parentage. And that is to arrive at what the blood quantum is.”

“I have been living with my grandmother since I was two days old,” says Powless, who turns 21 this month. She was born to a mother who left immediately, and a father who came around rarely. “They weren’t married, they just had a kid, and I was going to be up for adoption and my grandmother decided to take me.”

She was raised in a Ho-Chunk house and culture, which included pow wows, regalia, fancy dancing and later a more-modern expression of
Indianness—playing basketball. Powless, a six-foot-two power forward and center, was one of three talented players for a Wisconsin Dells high school team that won their conference two years in a row. Powless then enrolled at Division I Texas Southern University and made the basketball team as a freshman walk-on.

It is too common, she says, to see young people blow through tribal funds in a matter of months, spending them on shiny things. For Powless, her future—as a player and an aspiring athletic trainer—was the shining thing, paid for with a scholarship from the tribe. And she feels it has been stripped from her. She says the grandmother of one of her high school teammates called one night while she was home from college on a holiday break to reveal a dirty secret Powless says she had never heard: that the man she’d always believed was her father wasn’t.

“She kept saying she was doing this for [the teammate]. It was really confusing,” Powless says. The DNA results showed Powless to have a zero percent chance of being related to the man she thought was her father, which made her blood quantum too low for membership. Powless says her scholarship money never arrived, and she had to leave Texas Southern owing a year’s tuition. The school is holding her transcripts until she pays up.

“Instead of being a Division I athlete and going to college, I’m a waitress now,” she says. “I haven’t really sat down and cried…but coming home after work is hard. It was over something really small—high school basketball that nobody will remember in 10 years. But what they did to me, they affected my entire life.”

Alexie predicts nasty surprises.

DNA results that reveal unpleasant surprises about parentage are a frequent occurrence in Indian country, where grandmothers or aunties often care for infants born into bad domestic situations. “That’s one of the things about DNA testing—it is letting all of the skeletons out of the closet,” says James Mills, president of Creating Stronger Nations, a consulting firm that works with tribes to create policy documents on a range of governance issues, including enrollment. “The moment you draw a line in the sand on enrollment, the moment you have rules, there is going to be some unfairness. There is no perfect system. There just isn’t one.”

There is no perfect system, in part because the methods used to determine Indianness are not Indian. “It was white people who determined how we measure this,” says Sherman Alexie, the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet and novelist. “The thing about DNA testing is that if you are going to do it for potential members, you should do it for everybody. I think people in favor of DNA wouldn’t like their results. Depending on the studies [of U.S. populations], between 10 and 20 percent of kids are being raised by fathers who aren’t biological.

“And,” he jokes, “considering the hair on my chest, one of my grandmas had to lie.”

People interviewed for this story, whether they are for or against the use of DNA testing, agree there is already a litmus test—for you to be considered Indian any of the following statements are true:

“Really, the measure of being Indian should be a pain index,” Alexie says. “You know, how many funerals have you gone to?”

But even that test is subjective. “It comes down to who is a tribal member,” says Mills, pointing to the authority granted by Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, a landmark 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that notes sovereign Indian nations determine their own membership. “Tribes have rules about membership and for many years, many tribes were very lax about their rules. [But now], if you are a successful per-capita tribe, people will come out of the woodwork,” clamoring to be members. “Tribes began to get stricter about the enforcement of their rules…and thus you have this disenrollment phenomenon.”

California Indian peoples have endured slaughters and displacement from waves of invaders—Spaniards, Mexicans, Americans. Some tribal groups

The Cherokee use the Dawes Rolls to determine tribal membership.

became so shattered (there were only an estimated 15,000 California Indians in an 1890 census) that they wound up not on reservations, but on rancherias—small plots of land for homeless Indians.

And then came termination.

By the late 1950s, when the federal government came calling, the 80-acre Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians had just a few families left—a tribal elder and two of her adult children. That made it easy to decide who was in the tribe. The fireworks started when reinstatement finally came in the 1980s.

Factions formed between the two families who had remained on the land and others who had left over the years. The Chukchansi were barely 30-strong but competing tribal constitutions were submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. People were disenrolled and reenrolled depending on who was in power, and at least twice enrollment records were stolen from tribal headquarters near Coarsegold, California.

The 2003 opening of the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino exacerbated the already ugly enrollment fights. One-hundred-fifty-five tribal members, including the chairwoman, were kicked out in 1999 during negotiations to build the casino, and 363 more in 2006.

The upheaval “is not what this tribe created or any other tribe created,” says Jennifer Stanley, tribal councilwoman. “It is what the Bureau of Indian Affairs created long ago. They created those rifts. We carry the burden.”

She adds that the tribe’s newly adopted DNA ordinance is “just going to ensure that anybody who’s enrolled in the future will have a legitimate connection back to the allotments that are within our constitution.”

Stanley and Council Chairman Reggie Lewis say enrollment mistakes were made repeatedly during the first three decades since reinstatement, including over-enrolling to attract more federal money. The tribe had more than 1,000 members in the late 1990s.

Cathy Cory scoffs at this claim. “It is all about the greed and the power of people in tribal government,” she says. Cory and 41 members of her family were among the 363 ousted in 2006. She traces a Chukchansi ancestor to a type of allotment the council does not recognize. “It has been really difficult dealing with that emotional issue of one day you are Indian and the next day they try to tell you you’re not,” she says.

There has also been a moratorium on enrollment since 2003. Once lifted, everybody on the waiting list will be DNA tested, and Stanley and Lewis say they are bracing for inevitable surprises.

The ordinance only applies to new members, Stanley says. “You run into a lot of issues if you allow it to go 50 or 60 years back,” she says. “You would have people making a ton of allegations, and how would you substantiate any of those allegations?”

A thornier question for Cory, and for Laura Wass of the American Indian Movement, is finding due process for people facing expulsion from several central California tribes that are in casino-induced turmoil. This is a challenge when tribes, citing sovereignty, make arbitrary rulings and provide limited options for appeal. The federal government, despite lawsuits grinding through U.S. District courts, refuses to step in.

So the nice person in the lab coat just used a giant Q-tip to swab some saliva from inside your cheek. Does it go through some shiny, space-age machine that eventually spits out the answer: “Yup. Dude’s Indian” or “Nope. Dude’s lying”?

In a word: No. In a few more words: “Anybody who claims that they can find out if you are an Indian through DNA testing, that’s a fairy tale,” says Mills.

While there are different ways to use DNA to determine ancestry—even as far back as prehistoric times—tribes use a far–more specific, and less-anthropological, type of test. “The only way it’s really used is determining whether or not you are the child of the parent that you claim,” Mills explains.

Dr. Kittles has done testing for the freedmen.

This method accesses only a sliver of the 3 billion nucleotides in the human genome, says Brian Kemp, an assistant professor of molecular anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, where he analyzes the DNA of prehistoric populations. “Blood and DNA are the same thing, because you are really talking about: What is my ancestry? Who did I inherit my blood from? And the cutoff is arbitrary,” he says. It has to be, because the further we go back, the more connections we have.

“You go back, and in time there can’t be that many people we don’t share ancestors with,” he explains. “You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents. You keep going back and it’s 32, 64, 128, 256 relatives…and that’s only a couple hundred years ago. So we all share relatives in the recent past, even if we don’t remember [them].”

The freedmen were hoping to find such a connection to prove they belonged in the Cherokee Nation, and in 2004, Dr. Rick Kittles, a biologist and scientific director of the Washington D.C.-based genealogycompany, African Ancestry, offered to provide genomic testing for them. The freedmen were profoundly disappointed when tests showed low percentages of Native ancestry markers.

But there’s a deeper story, Kittles says. The results showed an unusually high degree of European ancestry markers among the tested freedmen, far higher than among other African American groups. These match the high degree of European markers found among Eastern Seaboard tribes, such as the Cherokee, who intermingled with white Europeans for half a millennium. “That’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years,” Kittles says. “How can we prove that the high fraction of European ancestry among freedmen came through Native Americans? It would be very, very difficult to prove that.”

Even paternity testing has holes, says Mills, especially “if you have flawed records to begin with.” He cites numerous instances of error or even fraud on base rolls. “[If] I’m a member even though I shouldn’t be, and you do a DNA test on my kid, it’s going to prove that it’s my kid. The DNA test doesn’t tell you the accuracy of what you are testing other than that you are the parent. So the notion that [DNA testing] is a panacea…is just nonsense.”

There are powerful forces at play here, pitting treaty rights against sovereignty against gaming revenue against race.

The Cherokee Nation high court, in its ruling August 22 that freedmen were not Indians, narrowly reasoned that the Cherokee people accepted free blacks and former slaves as citizens to abide by the Treaty of 1866, and therefore the Cherokee people maintain the right to determine citizenship today. In other words, they have the right to change their collective minds. “That’s basically what the entire case has been about—whether the Cherokee people have the right to decide what their own criteria is for citizenship in the Cherokee Nation,” says Diane Hammons, the tribe’s attorney general.

Some identity test is needed, tribal authorities say, because the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 hot-wired the economies of the Cherokee Nation and the other casino tribes. This has created a boom in membership: The Cherokee Nation had 50,000 enrolled members in 1980; today there are more than 300,000.

Hammons discounts charges of racism in the freedman case, pointing out that there are freedmen descendants who are enrolled Cherokee, and whose membership is not affected by the ruling. These folk can trace lineage to an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls, which is used by the Cherokee Nation to determine membership.

The Dawes lists “are race-based and are worse than biased,” says Ralph Keen II, a Stilwell, Oklahoma, attorney who represented freedmen in the nation’s courts. He is the namesake son of a revered Cherokee Nation jurist. Many blacks who may have been fully integrated members of Cherokee society for a century by the late 1800s were excluded from the rolls by the Dawes commissions, based on nothing more than racial appearance.

Marilyn Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association, can’t understand why the Cherokee Nation embraces the Dawes lists, which have been used to inflict pain and loss on Indian people for more than 100 years. “When the blood quantums were put out there by the federal government, that was more a way to further steal property and land and resources from the members of the tribe,” than it was about identity, she says. The Dawes Act stripped a shocking amount of land from Native peoples and also broke an age-old tradition of communal ownership.

“No one will admit to racism,” but the impetus to exclude freedmen comes from the shrinking percentage of Cherokee Nation full-bloods (10 percent or fewer of tribal members), says Keen.

There is, of course, another way of looking at the issue, one that includes rather than excludes. “Indians have always been multiracial and multicultural,” says Alexie, whose works often powerfully examine what it means to be Indian.

“What makes you Indian? That question is always up in the air,” says Janis Contraro, enrollment director of the Suquamish Tribe. “Most traditional Natives say it’s culture—if you live in a community, you are part of the community.”

Before the Dawes Act, Vann points out, “There were no lists. Just like right now there are no lists of American citizens [who] are a half-blood American. You’re a citizen or you’re not.”

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Comments

Indians come in all races, even White. Race never mattered to us. We adopted - even kidnapped - Whites, Mexicans, Blacks, everyone and intermarried with them. That being said, today, Whites who have ZERO Indian culture care about DNA testing. The rest of don't care because we know who our families are and we know who our tribal members are. It is only when you try to desperately find that last drop of Indian blood in your genealogy that DNA testing becomes important. The bottomline: if you need to resort to the highly-suspect science of DNA testing, you are NOT Indian. If you are Indian, it should already be in your culture. And oh the Cherokees stopped being Indian several generations ago, so the Black Freedmen issue is a non-issue. The Cherokees are no longer Indian. Sounds harsh but it's the truth.

Hi, I am Todd Knauss, I have another reason for using DNA testing to find my Indian roots - if I have any. I guess I can understand the money rights issue via Causinos and other situations,, but I'm following family history leads that I feel the emotional need to. My Grandmother's family originated from Virginia (Gibson &amp;Curry) we have many family members that have Indian traits and also it has been told that we have American Indian in us. But because of American history and biases,, I think a lot of our true history was just kept quiet,, over the years with so many family combinations some of us have blue eyes some are very dark complected with Brown eyes. I would love to be able to pass on the knowledge to future generations the truth,,so I think if someone has the need and emotions to find answers, it is important,, and even though I wouldn't be able to be a member of a tribe,, I would still feel a bond and support that tribe as well as other tribes because of the connection I felt. I don't think I am alone in this quest,, there are probably many "lost" folks out there,, and if it found true,, the added support to the many tribes I think would be a plus?? not sure, Those who are current members of tribes can answer that better. God Bless best of wishes to all. Todd

I'm a Paiute (Numa) from a Reservation in California. I have developed a Reservation from virgin land because it was overlooked by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I have developed the Enrollment Ordinance that this Tribe uses for enrolling citizens of this Tribal Government. Like the Cherokees using the Dawes rolls, I used the 1928 California Indian Roll that was approved by the federal governemtn in 1933. The reservation that I created was established by Presidential Executive Order on July 22 1915, so I used an official records that is closed to the time period of the reservation creation. Only those Paiutes that were living in the community near the Reswervation was eligibe to become citizens of the Tribe, without a blood degree. However, those that were not on this roll are required to be at least 1/4 degree of Indian Blood. This Tribe is not a casino Tribe as of yet. But there has been problems that has arised as to who is eligilbe for enrollment.
I have came to the believe that culture can not be a factor that determines that some one is an American Indian. Culture is a learned behavior and many non-Indians have have and can learn the culture as well the language of any tirbe that is still available today. By learning a culture of an American Indian does not make that person an American Indian. The only factor that makes a person an American Indian is the blood in their veins or the DNA that shows that they are American Indian. Certainly DNA does not prove what Tribe they may be,but it will show that they are Indian - there is a firm that is trying to trace the DNA of Indians in the Western Hemishere only, something like "Tribal DNA". Therefore, I have always been a person that needs tohave an individual that claims to be American Indian to prove it. There are two many benefits today for American Indians, and other perople always want these benefits as well and therefore make the claim, but can not prove that they are American Indians.
DNA may be the only way that an individual can prove that they are
American Indian with the assitance Genealogy, proving that there are correct records.

It does sound like Greed and Power to me. If a person is not an
American Native Indian then that person shouldn't be aloud to join.
They should be checked out thoroughly before gaining exceptence in to
the tribe.

i am joe my family has ben in the nation for 160 years but i am not a mumber nor was my grate grandmouther nor did she apply nor have i its looks like you dont welcome your native american familys to be part of your nation i dont no what to do i think your hatred is not for me

I know my ancestors,I know my blood,there is no law, either state of federal or tribal that can tell me that I am not Native American. I am grey now but my hair was red and my eyes are blue. I am not a wantabe and I am proud of all of my ancestors, who intermarried with those who the governments attempted to wipe out and those who would not accept me because I don"t fit the bill of looking like a "red skin". Joseph Two Feathers Killen

I am wondering how I can go about having my daughters DNA tested to see how much Cherokee blood they have in them, my grandfather was half cherokee on my dads side, on my moms side my grandfather was a quarter cherokee. My girls also have some Cherokee from my husbands side as well. If anyone with any information can email me back at ward.candice60@hotmail.com I would truly appreciate it.

yall say what ya want about DNA testing. as for me, I feel that its now a necessity. I am of indian descent, however, I have no way of linking my indian heritage except to use DNA. Alot of my ancestors were not on any of the rolls. They refused to register for the fear of being killed. This has been passed down from generation to generation. I know not what tribe my ancestory origionated, but I would like to know. As each generation passes, there are stories told hardships, battles & indian royalty. Ive been told for years that I belong to a royal indian family, and I need to know the truth. Once again, it doesnt matter yet whether or not I am related. Everyone in everyday life can see the indian in me, but thanks to persicution, and fear of death, my ancestors left us all in the dark. I dont blame them, but I would love to know about my lineage.

what i want to find out and why has nothing to do with money or benefits. It has to do with lineage, with passing down a family history of truth to my children, to stop once and for all the 1/16th of my family that say we are not Native American. To find answers to things that have happened in some of us in our dreams, and live events. I want to grow in knowledge of my Native Beliefs, I don't want to feel like a fraud in learning another tribes beliefs only to find out i was learning about the wrong family. It is emotional for me, a deep seated need i have had since as long as i can remember, I am over 50yrs now and still this question burns a hole in my thoughts. I want to learn about my family. is this really so wrong! Yes I want DNA testing to either break my heart from what i believe or to send me forward on a journey of coming home.

My whole life I have heard hushes rumors that I am native American. Well even though I was born with white skin and green eyes my teeth prove I am. I don't need DNA test for that. I don't want any benefits from the government I went to college and make my own money. But I would like to find out what tribe I'm from just because I want to learn about my ancestors. I am white because scared people had to blend in to survive and DNA testing is the only way I can know that part of myself. Scared people trying to blend in didn't tell much about what they were hiding.

My maternal grandfather, Eugene Crawford, I understand was full blooded Iroquois. If true My siblings and I are 1/4. They kept no accurate records, how do I discover the amount of Indian blood I am? Please reach out to me; marilyn@finalesalon.com
Thank you,
Marilyn Ann
PS it had been explained to me that the Iroquois came from the Seneca Tribe.

There are a number of websites that will send you a DNA collection kit to determine whether you have Native American blood such as Ancestry.com, and AncestrybyDNA.com. But simply determining whether you have Native blood does not determine what tribe your ancestors may have been a part of. To determine that you will have to start tracing your ancestry back using something like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com or FamilySearch.org or find a genealogist willing to help with the search, professionals are listed by specialty including Native American at ApGen.org.

i was adopted in 1974 i was told my father died but he is full native american my bilogical mother is still alive but wont give me any info what is the best dna test to take to proof my native american heritage & what is the processd? please email me asap samanthamaffei@yahoo.com

I am having issues with enrollment, not because of my degree of blood but because of the "born to a member of the community" clause...my father was erroneously enrolled with another tribe and has since passed away. The economic aspect of enrollment is not what should be important. What happened to tribal identity? I feel like this is NOT how things are supposed to be.

I am having issues with enrollment, not because of my degree of blood but because of the "born to a member of the community" clause...my father was erroneously enrolled with another tribe and has since passed away. The economic aspect of enrollment is not what should be important. What happened to tribal identity? I feel like this is NOT how things are supposed to be.

I remember reading that, historically, Native Americans weren't obsessed with the origins of tribe members. If you were raised as a member of the nation, you were a member of the nation; there was none of the hyphenated crap that we whites use as a means of both inclusion and exclusion.
Then we taught Indians to obsess over ancestry by deciding who was a 'real' Indian or not, and (mis)treating individuals accordingly.
And now, because of a handful of greedy people who tried to cash in on tribal casino wealth, people who -- regardless of genetics -- are Indians have been disenrolled and punished for not meeting some variation of white-imposed criteria.
It's a crying shame, and I hope people see sense before Native America irreparably fractures.

toddknauss: I know exactly where you're coming from. Growing up, my family didn't think we had any Indian blood. We were, however, told that we were "Black Dutch". We have some Indian traits, and my mother could easily pass for half Native American. She has been asked what tribe she was in all her life. She told them she wasn't Indian because she thought she wasn't. I did some research about 5 years ago and come to find out, my g-g-g-g-great grandmother on my mom's side was half Cherokee. A distant cousin did some genealogy research and he confirmed what I found. It explains a lot. My g-g-g-g-great grandmother was born in eastern Tennessee in the old Cherokee homeland, and when the government came along to round her and her family up to send them to Oklahoma, they lied and said that they were "Black Dutch". They later moved to Arkansas and had to keep their Indian heritage a secret. I'm not a prideful person, but I'm quite proud that my ancestors were able to stick it to the US government. The sad thing is that the Indian heritage was snuffed out and they told their kids that they were Black Dutch and none of us were raised with any Native culture. Since they didn't move to Oklahoma, they weren't on any of the rolls so I can't join a tribe. I find it ironic that I moved to Oklahoma a few years ago after what my ancestors did to avoid moving here. I want to take a DNA test so I'll know how much Native blood I have, and to confirm my research. I may not have much, but it comes out in my looks and the way I act and think about some things. Not to be stereotypical, but I'm quiet, introspective, and I have a deep respect for nature and I get boiling mad at things like Mount Rushmore, mountaintop removal in West Virginia, littering and industrial pollution. I have high cheekbones and epicanthic eye folds as well. I also suspect that my dad's side has some Indian blood because my dad can't grow a beard and his chest hair is very spotty along with some other traits. I asked the family about it once and they said "NO" and acted like they didn't want to talk about it. I'm not doing the DNA test for anybody else: I'm doing it for me. It will give me some peace of mind and will also possibly uncover some other ethnicities that I am not aware of. I wish I could join a tribe, but I haven't been able to find any family members on any of the rolls. My paternal grandpa was born in Oklahoma so there's a possibility that one of his relatives is listed. I'm going to keep researching and get a DNA test and see what the results say.

Here's an instance of colonization infecting Indian tribes. Part of the problem is greed, part is racism. Blood quantum is a white man's concept. Culling the enrollment lists only makes tribes smaller and weaker in the eyes of the white man. How is it right to toss people who have lived their lives as tribal members their entire lives and telling them that they aren't "real" Indians? Especially if they have been raised by and loved by other Indians?

I think the reverse needs to be done. I mean everyone who feels privileged over First Nations people need this test to be done. Poverty is almost defining the majority of my native peoples across this land, and with some of our natives whom move to the city, will most likely find their own to buffer a culture shock! For those who dont and procreate with a different culture, a new breed is born and a new government decision is made on that child's identity! Even our own native communities within, have a certain amount of prejudice with those whom have a degree of native blood, and are shunned or scorned & judged unfairly by the skin tone, physical features, education, and un-jaded attitude!
But this is only an after affect from their own childhoods, whether its environmental abuse or government abuse. Distrust is very common amongst our peoples and makes for a harder living on and off-reserve for majority of elders that lived through the burden of a life to be themselves as a native person. Colonial government then & now still promote discrimination and predjudice against us natives, whether we show our pride or not!
In my own truth...I am neither American or Indian! I am Onkwehonwe, On;yotak'a (Oneida) of Six Nation Federation! That is where you will find my pride!
I find the generalized label, 'Indian', offensive and wrong on so many counts. But is officially used by the American & Canadian governments to describe us as a lump whole sum! unfortunately, we ourselves, have also used this antiquated term in our symbols, writings, and even attaching a pride to it! It removes the immediate importance of what nation on Turtle Island we are from, and removes the significance of all our various cultures and languages associated with it!
The 'American' label, also concerns me, and to say we 'North American Indians', only would prove Christopher Columbus that this land is America! In fact, Americus (Vespucious), was a person whom named the lower part of what we call South America, and how that name was brought here was obviously through Colombus!
If we are to remove all these blatant attitudes and even those iconic sports symbols from society that are cast and used on us as a past & insignifcant peoples, then let us start removing their associated symbols & labels of us, by regaining our true cultural inherited identities, and begin to relearn our ways, and walk our forefathers path to gain strength, health of mind and peace of heart in knowing who we can be!
..and for those who impose such invasive tests of whom is original from this continent & whom is not! Time to start looking into their own pasts and see if they are legally, by their government papers, even legally belong here!
In conclusion: This continent has become a melting pot where different cultures from all over the globe have come to escape Tyranny, Corrupt Government, War, Death by genocide/torture, and Starvation and search for Truth, Liberty & Freedoms! ...... EVERYTHING THAT WAS TAKEN AWAY FROM US!

beaver: Cherokees stopped being Indian, huh? Well as you say, "this may sound harsh but it's true" and I'm sure you are just a troll anyway, but on behalf of all 286,000 members of the second largest tribe, I respectfully invite you to come choke down this 100% genuine Indian oak, fool!
1. You don't speak for "us." I doubt any of us alive would think we speak for every member of every tribe.
2. Race never mattered to us, huh? That's interesting seeing as you are telling me my tribe "stopped being Indian," whatever that means.
3. I find it ironic and a bit hilarious that you are going on about desperately testing others for their blood and how that doesn't matter, being that you are decreeing yourself the arbiter of such distinctions...

My Grandmother on my Mothers side is Blackfeet, my Grandmother on my
Fathers side is Cherokee and someone is Apache. I was told I have Indian
blood running in my veins. I will get a DNA test to see how much Indian I am.
I'm not doing this to gain anything, or to join a tribe. I just want to know.